Richard Kerr
 Richard Kerr    (spook) | ||||||||||||
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| Born | October 4, 1935 | |||||||||||
| Member of | Mitre Corporation, Scott Trust Ltd/Board | |||||||||||
| Interests | Velvet revolution | |||||||||||
Deputy Director of Central Intelligence under George H. W. Bush.
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Richard James Kerr had a 32 year CIA career. He was DDCI under George H. W. Bush.
Career
During his more than 30 years, Kerr rose through the ranks quickly, serving in all four directories--Intelligence, Operations, Administration, and Science/Technology (reaching Director level in both Intelligence and Administration)--before eventually becoming Deputy Director of the CIA (DDCI).[1]
Kerr was responsible for many highly visible tasks such as providing the US President with a daily briefing of CIA intelligence.
His career with the CIA included involvement in the bombing raids against Libya in 1986[2] and culminated with key roles in managing U.S. intelligence related to the near nuclear stand-off between India and Pakistan in 1990[3]
He also implies heavy involvement in the color revolutions that brought down the Communist East bloc governments in the late 1980s-early 90s:
I'll take exception, for instance, to your thing that we missed the wall. We may have missed the actual coming down of the wall, but what we did is beautifully handle the Velvet Revolution and the transition from East Europe communist-dominated countries to what amounted to independent countries. ...[4]
He dealt with the attempted coup against Boris Yeltsin in August, 1991.[5]
Private Sector
From 1994 to 2002, Mr. Kerr was chairman of the Advisory Board of the spooky ManTech International Corporation. Mr. Kerr was on the board of directors of MITRE Corporation and LexisNexis. Later he was on the board of directors of BAE Systems, Inc., a subsidiary of BAE Systems Plc.
Rumsfeld Intelligence Review
In 2003, at the suggestion of Donald Rumsfeld, a group was put together to review the intelligence on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction program, and Kerr was asked to head it. "The secretary of defense actually wrote a letter to the director of central intelligence and said, 'It would be useful to have a study ... of what intelligence said up to the point of the war and then use the ground truth to kind of test those assumptions and those judgments,'" Kerr recalls. His group ultimately published four reports (two of which remain classified): The first looked at pre-war intelligence on Iraq; the second evaluated the raw intelligence that went into the infamous National Intelligence Estimate; the third assessed the strengths and weaknesses of intelligence analysis; and the fourth suggested improvements.[4]
References
- ↑ https://www.amazon.com/Unclassified-Life-Before-During-After/dp/1950544109
- ↑ Prados, John, President's Secret Wars, CIA and Pentagon Covert Operations from World War II through IRANSCAM, New York, Quill, 1986, 385.
- ↑ Andrew, Christopher, For the President's Eyes Only, Secret Intelligence and the American Presidency from Washington to Bush, New York: HarperCollins Publishing, 1995, 516.
- ↑ a b https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/darkside/interviews/kerr.html
- ↑ Andrew, Christopher, For the President's Eyes Only, Secret Intelligence and the American Presidency from Washington to Bush, New York: HarperCollins Publishing, 1995, 530.
